Nell Scovell, one of a handful of women who has ever worked as a comedy writer for David Letterman — or any of the late night comic talk shows — contends that an atmosphere of sexual harassment routinely exists on those shows:

Without naming names or digging up decades-old dirt, let’s address the pertinent questions. Did Dave hit on me? No. Did he pay me enough extra attention that it was noted by another writer? Yes. Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.

Here’s what I did: I walked away from my dream job. The show picked up my option after 13 weeks; then, about two months later, while looking for a nicer apartment, I realized I didn’t want to commit to a yearlong lease. I’d seen enough to know that I was not going to thrive professionally in that workplace. And although there were various reasons for that, sexual politics did play a major part.

As Rachel Sklar points out, Scovell isn’t some unsuccessful woman blaming her woes on her sex: “She created the TV series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and has written for Coach, Murphy Brown, Monk, N.C.I.S., Charmed, The Critic, The Simpsons and Newhart. And Late Night with David Letterman.”   Indeed, as Scovell notes in her piece, she was the story editor for Newhart when she was hired to write for Dave.

Melissa McEwan, Don Surber, and Ed Driscoll all bring different perspectives on this but still agree this was sexual harassment.  So do I.

But here’s the thing:  I don’t know what you do about it.

Letterman controls these people’s careers, so for him to have sexual relations with them is problematic and opens him and his company up for lawsuits. Sexuality creates incredible tension and problems in a workplace.  Ideally, then, we would just treat each other as colleagues rather than as potential romantic partners.  But people like this spend an inordinate amount of time at work and attraction does happen. Supervisors and subordinates not only become sexually intimate but fall and love and build lives together. It happens all the time.

In larger offices, this is reasonably easy to fix.  People can move laterally to avoid senior-subordinate relationships.  But in a small team like a 14-person comedy show staff?

Scovell’s solution is to hire more women.  She reports that there are currently zero women working on any of the major shows (Letterman, Leno, and O’Brien — no mention of Colbert and Stewart).   But, as a practical matter, having zero women markedly reduces the chance of sexual harassment!  With more women on the staff — something that otherwise seems a no-brainer given the number of women in the audience — there’s more chance for relationships to form and resentments to foster.

So, there’s the law, human decency, and the way things ought to be.  But there’s also human nature and the power of romantic and/or sexual attraction.  These things often conflict.

Joshua Foust continues to call attention to widespread and institutionalized child rape — mostly man-on-boy — in Afghanistan, this time with a report that Canadian soldiers had been quietly told to ignore the practice because we needed the cooperation of the leaders doing the raping. Steve Hynd, naturally, wonders why this isn’t widely reported and why senior U.S. officials aren’t being asked about American policy on this troubling issue.

Meanwhile, Jim Henley (via Google Reader) encapsulates my immediate reaction: “This problem could be solved if the Afghan security forces would make a few well-regarded movies.”

Snark aside, this just highlights the impossibility of our mission in Afghanistan.  How, precisely, are we to inculcate a Western-style civil society in a culture so utterly barbaric?

Roman Polanski, who fled the United States in 1977 after conviction for raping a 13-year-old, has been arrested in Switzerland and is fighting extradition to Los Angeles.

Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978, was detained Saturday after arriving to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival. It was not clear why U.S. authorities had chosen this moment to act on Polanski, 76, a regular visitor to Switzerland with a house here.

“We are going to demand his release and we are going to defend ourselves against the reasons for the extradition procedure,” Herve Temime, Polanski’s lawyer, told French daily Le Figaro. “It seems indefensible that 30 years after the fact a 76-year-old man who has shown no evidence of any danger to society and whose reputation … is well established, can spend a single day in prison,” Temime said.

It’s hardly unusual that someone convicted of a felony who fled the country to avoid punishment would be sought after. But, oddly, this sentiment is shared by WaPo columnist Anne Applebaum, who terms the arrest “outrageous.”

Here are some of the facts: Polanski’s crime — statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl — was committed in 1977. The girl, now 45, has said more than once that she forgives him, that she can live with the memory, that she does not want him to be put back in court or in jail, and that a new trial will hurt her husband and children. There is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial. There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age. Polanski, who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial, has been pursued by this case for 30 years, during which time he has never returned to America, has never returned to the United Kingdom., has avoided many other countries, and has never been convicted of anything else. He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.

He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, though for a time Polanski himself was a suspect.

Rape isn’t a tort; it’s a felony. So whether the victim wishes to press charges is irrelevant except as to the practicalities of securing a conviction, which isn’t a problem in this case since Polanski pled guilty.

Patrick Frey, an assistant district attorney in LA whose office is seeking Polanski’s extradition, notes that Polanski “pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, in return for the agreement to dismiss several other charges, including rape and sodomy.”  He and a co-blogger remind us of the graphic details of the case, which belie the notion that Polanski is some sort of victim. Let’s just say that the girl in question was drugged and the encounter was otherwise decidedly less than romantic.  See also the victim’s grand jury testimony, which makes clear the sex was forcible and that, even drugged with alcohol and Quaaludes,  she explicitly denied consent.  Which, of course, a 13-year-old can not give under the law.  (In a separate post, Frey notes that Applebaum’s husband is Poland’s foreign minister, who is lobbying for Polanski’s release.)

Oddly, Applebaum’s view on this matter is hardly unique. He’s being portrayed as a hapless victim and a harmless 76-year-old being hounded for no particular reason. And, while I’m generally dubious of putting old men in jail for crimes they committed decades earlier and have shown no propensity to commit again, I’m rather loathe to reward confessed child molesters for fleeing the country.  (Kieran Healy, generally to my left politically, also sneers at Polanski defenders:  “Puritanical Americans simply do not have the enlightened attitude toward wine at the dinner table, quaaludes, and child rape that the Europeans do.”)

Oh, as to the horrible price he’s paid in “professional stigma,”as Applebaum’s own post notes, he was in Switzerland to pick up a lifetime achievement award and had recently won the Academy Award, the highest honor in his industry.  He’s received countless other accolades and has, one presumed, earned millions and lived a life of high luxury.  So, I’m hard pressed to feel sympathy for his three decades of suffering.  Certainly not on the basis of having to avoid countries with extradition treaties to the United States, which would be akin to sympathizing with the murderer of his parents on the grounds he’s an orphan.

UPDATE:  Alex Knapp points me to this quote from Kate Harding, which rather well encapsulates my thoughts:

The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not — and at least in theory, does not — tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you’ve made.

Quite.

UPDATE:  David Gibson, bemused that so many in Europe and the Hollywood community share Applebaum’s view, wonders what the reaction would be were Polanski a Catholic priest rather than a filmmaker.

But what if Roman Polanksi were wearing a Roman collar? Would “Monsignor Polanksi” receive the same considerations? As Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit, writes at the Post’s “On Faith” site, “Imagine if the Knights of Columbus decided to give an award to a pedophile priest who had fled the country to avoid prison. The outcry would be universal.” And rightly so, as Reese says. But Polanski gets an Oscar in absentia in 2003 and earns sympathy because he can’t receive it in person.

The YahooNews headline “Openly gay teen voted prom queen at LA high school” did its intended task of enticing me to click to read the AP story:

An openly gay teen was voted prom queen at Los Angeles’ Fairfax High School in a campaign that began as a stunt but ended up spurring discussion on the campus about gender roles and teen popularity. Sergio Garcia, 18, was crowned queen Saturday night at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

“I feel invincible,” Garcia said in his tiara and charcoal-gray tuxedo.

A few days earlier, he gave a speech that won over some cynics and led to an ovation and his unlikely victory.  “At one time, prom may have been a big popularity contest where the best-looking guy or girl were crowned king and queen. Things have changed and it’s no longer just about who has the most friends or who wears the coolest clothes,” Garcia told a gymnasium full of seniors. “I’m not your typical prom queen candidate. There’s more to me than meets the eye.”

Garcia assured the crowd he wouldn’t wear a dress on prom night. “I will be wearing a suit,” he said. “But don’t be fooled, deep down I am a queen.”

I’m not sure what to think of this.  On the one hand, the kid wanted to be prom queen and the other students voted for him, whether out of solidarity, jest, or some combination of factors.   On the other, this just seems weird. Doesn’t the school have some bylaws specifying that prom queens should be chicks and prom kings dudes?

For that matter, while I recognize that different subcultures have variation within them, this wouldn’t seem to be helping convey the message that gay males are otherwise perfectly normal men who simply prefer having sex with other men rather than the customary opposite sex.

UPDATE: Commenter PD Shaw suggests the question should be “Why isn’t he the King?”  Quite.   The kid isn’t transgendered; he’s homosexual.

Photos: Cindy Casares

Big Hollywood’s Leo Grin has an excellent analysis of the classic Howard Hawks film Rio Bravo,  which was made 50 years ago. A generous excerpt:

Characters are the most important elements of any Hawks movie. By 1958 he had concluded that “audiences were getting tired of plots….But if you keep them from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest…It’s when a character believes in something that a situation happens, not because you write it to happen.” Hawks had an unparalleled flair for consciously using detail to expertly reveal character. All throughout the production of Rio Bravo, he would sit silently as the actors rehearsed their scenes, ever on the lookout for ways to organically grow their motivations cinematically, thereby creating deep wells of subtext without clubbing the audience over the head with a screaming, obvious M-E-S-S-A-G-E.

[...]

Most crucially, it was director Hawks who crafted John Wayne’s character into a master not only of action but of reaction, in the process establishing an overriding feeling of camaraderie that makes the film endlessly rewatchable. “John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on screen,” Hawks claimed, and yet by dint of directorial will the star of Rio Bravo becomes everyone else’s straight man. During the course of the plot the Duke gets socked by Dean Martin (twice!), is verbally out-dueled by the precocious Ricky Nelson, suffers the outrageous behavior of Walter Brennan, is relentlessly teased by the ever-flirtatious Angie Dickinson, and is continuously rescued by all of the above. “You give everybody else the fireworks,” Wayne grumbled to Hawks at one point, “but I have to carry the damn thing.”

And yet Hawks knew that, with a universe of talents at his disposal, Wayne’s secret weapon was always his generosity and humility as an actor, his penchant for binding himself and his ego to the needs of a picture. He was unparalleled in his ability to lend his potent movie-star glow to others in a scene, holding up the entire business like a grizzled, enduring Atlas. For Rio Bravo, the breakthrough came during one of Dean Martin’s many set-pieces, while Wayne was standing aside and watching glumly as Martin got to once again chew up the scenery with his performance. “What do I do while he’s playing all of these good scenes?” he finally asked Hawks in frustration.

“Well,” Hawks replied, “you look at him as a friend.”

Suddenly everything Hawks had been striving for, the entire emotional spectrum he was meticulously constructing, became clear. And throughout the finished Rio Bravo, you can go to any point and see the spectacular results of Wayne embracing Hawks’ perceptive direction. Watch, for instance, the scene after Walter Brennan’s character Stumpy has almost killed Dean Martin by carelessly shooting at him through the jailhouse door. Wayne stands by as Brennan, one of the all-time great scene-stealing character actors, goes through an entire blabbering monologue of words and emotions that covers denial, mortification, and finally a resigned acceptance of responsibility. It’s all great stuff, hugely entertaining — but look closely at Wayne. Not a word spoken, not a single word. And yet his pitch-perfect reactions to each of Brennan’s lines gives the scene its touching pathos and power.

Wayne spends virtually the entire film loaning his star power to others in this fashion, not acting so much as reacting, and using those reactions to give his co-stars a much brighter spotlight in which to shine. Indisputably, we have Howard Hawks to thank for that.

Much, much more at the link.

Randy Barnett says the flick “was never one of my favorite westerns” but will give it another go after Grin’s review. It’s long been one of my favorite Wayne flicks precisely because of the great character interaction described above, featuring the superb repartee that was a hallmark of most of the Duke’s best movies.  Similarly, the best of the genre, and certainly “Rio Bravo” was an archetype, very much had a M-E-S-S-A-G-E but it was conveyed through the protagonist’s deeds rather than a lot of speechifying.

John Wayne vehicles were seldom realistic and often corny by today’s more cynical standards.  But they were incredibly entertaining and uplifting.  I recently saw the new “Star Trek” movie and found it much the same.  After years of that franchise leaving its “space opera” roots for more preachy plots, it was great to see the focus returned to daring heroism and the interaction between friends whose bonds have been forged through shared trials.

UPDATE: See my July 2003 post, “High Noon for U.S. Army,” for a more detailed discussion of Rio Bravo as Hawks’ and Wayne’s angry counterpoint to the Gary Cooper classic High Noon. Grin’s essay also discusses that angle.

Actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, Alan Rosenberg, poses for a portrait in this March 17, 2003, file photo taken in Los Angeles. The Screen Actors Guild said Saturday Nov. 22, 2008 that contract talks with Hollywood studios has failed despite the help of a federal mediator and it will now ask its members to authorize a strike. (AP Photo/Ric Francis, File)

In what seems an inauspicious time, what with a down economy, the Screen Actors Guild is threatening a strike.

“We have already made difficult decisions and sacrifices in an attempt to reach agreement,” the statement said. “Now it’s time for SAG members to stand united and empower the national negotiating committee to bargain with the strength of a possible work stoppage behind them.”

The statement did not specify what led to the impasse, saying only that “management continues to insist on terms we cannot responsibly accept.” A SAG spokeswoman said she would not comment further. A call to the movie producers group, known as the AMPTP, was not immediately returned.

It’s difficult to imagine a less sympathetic labor class — or one less in need of collective bargaining — than Hollywood actors. The horrible working conditions that could lead to the strike?

SAG is seeking union coverage for all Internet-only productions regardless of budget and residual payments for Internet productions replayed online, as well as continued actor protections during work stoppages. But the AMPTP said it was untenable for SAG to demand a better deal than what writers, directors and another actors union accepted earlier in the year, especially now that the economy has worsened.

Indeed.

The entertainment industry has once again gone to court in a futile attempt to prevent consumers from copying software for their own use.

Hollywood’s six major movie studios on Tuesday sued RealNetworks Inc. to prevent it from distributing DVD copying software that they said would allow consumers to “rent, rip and return” movies or even copy friends’ DVD collections outright.

The studios stand to lose key revenue from the sale of DVDs, estimated by Adams Media Research at $15 billion in the U.S. this year, if consumers stop buying DVDs and instead copy rental discs from outlets like Netflix and Blockbuster.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges RealNetworks’ RealDVD program, which launched Tuesday, illegally bypasses the copyright protection built into DVDs. “The incentive for the consumer is obvious and all but overwhelming,” the studios said in a request for a temporary restraining order. “‘Why,’ he or she may ask, ’should I pay $18.50 to purchase a DVD when I can rent it for $3.25 and make a permanent copy?’”

For $30, consumers can buy RealDVD and use it to copy DVDs to computers or portable hard drives, though the program prevents them from transferring the files to other users. The maker calls RealDVD “100 percent legal” on its Web site.

It’s not at all clear to me how this is any different than, say, a VCR, which allows copying of movies from premium movie channels or even pay-per-view or those dual cassette tape machines from the 1980s which allowed directly copying record albums.

People are allowed to make “personal use” copies of software they own, after all, and they’ve essentially always been able to copy rental movies. Indeed, I used to do that all the time using two VCRs and some RCA cables. So long as one isn’t reselling them, it’s never been considered a problem.

Readers may be familiar with the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics (short version: the US can do whatever it wants if it just has even willpower). Now, it appears we can add another member of the Justice League to our understanding of foreign policy. On Friday, author Andrew Klavan had a piece in the WSJ comparing Batman and George W. Bush (yes, you read that correctly): What Bush and Batman Have in Common

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Call me crazy, but I am betting pretty heavily that the producers of the latest Batman flick aren’t out to sing the praises of the 43rd president, but oh well.

Klavan’s piece seems to have two basic points within it. One is about about foreign/security policy under the war on terror and the other is about movies on general.

The Batman Theory of Foreign Policy. The logic here appears to be the brute force and general havoc is sometimes necessary when going after the bad guys. Batman works in the shadows and seeks to control crime in Gotham by brute force and by doing things that the cops can’t do. However, Klavan’s view that one can actually look at Batman as even a useful allegory about the war on terror illustrates perhaps the key problem with what has been the underlying logic in much of the Bush administration’s approach to counter-terrorism, i.e., that it is that it is all very simply: just punish the bad guys.

There are two basic assumptions inherent in the overall approach: 1) whatever the good guy does in pursing the bad guy is ultimately good and is justified because the good guy only wants good, and 2) the good guy only using his powers against the bad buys. It assumes above all else that it is easy to identify the bad guys, as in movies (or the comics) where they wear costumes and they are quite obvious in their malefaction. For example, the most ardent supporters of the administration think that this is the way the War on Terror works–for example, that everyone at Gitmo is obviously a terrorist (even if we know that that is not the case) and that they are all on the same level as Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers. In that world, just having the wrong name or being in the wrong place at the wrong time isn’t a problem as the wrong people are never punished or harmed because, again, we know who the bad guys are and no mistakes are ever made. In the comics, only the bad guys are punished and they deserve everything that they get. The neoconservatives like to think that that is what happens in real life, but it isn’t and one cannot formulate policy based on that notion as whenever a nation-state starts to throw its weight around, innocents will always be hurt and to pretend otherwise is foolishness.

Indeed, it would seem that we thought that that Batman approach was going to work in Iraq: jump in, defeat the supervillan (Saddam) and his henchmen and that would solve all the problems. Lest anyone didn’t notice, unlike in the comics, defeating the head honcho didn’t fix everything in Iraq–not by a longshot.

And, I suppose that when it comes to Dubya’s Rogue’s Gallery, the less said about Osama bin Laden the better, or the fact that Bush ultimately negotiated with Kim Jong Il and with the Iranians as well.

“Conservative” Movies. Part of what Klavan is dealing with as well is that notion that Batman represents a specific type of “conservative” movie:

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

In regards to movies and ideology he states:

time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror — films like “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted” — which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3″ and now “The Dark Knight”?

First, I am not sure why these are “conservative” movies, per se (although of those mentioned, 300 was pretty clearly embraced as a neoconservative opus—see a discussion of this here.). I don’t think that it is legitimate to say that the presence of a clear good guy and a clear bad guy means that a movie is necessarily “conservative.” While Klavan asserts that these views can somehow only be projected by Hollywood by “putting on a mask” the main thing that all of these movies have in common is that they are all fantasies and are ultimately simple tales where the good guys and bad guy are clear and the script can control how the tale ends (indeed in all of these movies we know from the very beginning that Good with triumph over Evil—which is at least in part why we go see them in the first place). The sad thing is that in the real world it is rarely that simple, and even when it is the end of the story is not predetermined.

I have seen none of the “left wing” films he cites, so cannot comment on their content, however to compare their box office performance to the blockbuster fantasy films (and I have seen all of those listed except 300) in question is absurd. Even if they had been realistic yet “conservative” films about the war on terror, they would have likely bombed as well. Let’s face facts: mass appeal movies are escapist vehicles, and realistic films tend not to do that well at the box office. Indeed, I suppose that United 93, which I did see, was a realistic “conservative” movie about terrorism and it hardly had the same box office as the LotR trilogy. United 93 simply wasn’t entertaining, while The Return of the King was.

The only “realistic” movie that I suspect that Klavan would consider “left wing” of this type that I can think of that I have seen was The War Within, which did show the radicalization of a young Pakistani man as the result of a rendition by the CIA. The film’s goal was not to justify terrorism but it did make the clear argument that bad choices made by the US and its allies can have horrible consequences. Such films may not make us cheer, but they may make us think, which is hardly a bad thing.

On the Evil Question. Understand, I am not saying that there isn’t evil in the world, there clearly is (and yes, sometimes people don’t want to call it that). I will even admit that I initially applauded Bush’s “Axis of Evil” notion, but the reality is, stark views of the world work better in the world of fiction than in the real one and often make it more difficult to accomplish one’s goals. For example: if one of our national goals is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, then having tagged them as “evil” makes dealing with them a tad difficult. How does one sit down and talk to evil? After all, as Klavan notes, Batman simply pummels evil. Beyond that, if I have called you evil, do you really want to talk to me? And there is the fact that by invading one Axis state (Iraq) we upped the ante on the security dilemma for the Iranians making the acquisition of nuclear weapons even more desirable to them from their point of view. Ultimately we haven’t been well-served by this approach.

In the movies Mordor is an unrepentant, unredeemable place filled with nothing but evil (Sauron, Nazgûl, Orcs and the like). If it is destroyed, nothing good dies; no innocents are harmed. However, the same cannot be said, for example, of North Korea or Iran. Even if one casts Kim Jong Il or Mahmood Ahmejinedad in the Sauron role, the people of those states are as often the victims of their governments rather than the teeming minions of evil. Beyond that, in the movie the destruction of evil is ultimately a fairly simply thing: put Ring A in Volcano B. Sure it was hard to get there, and there was self-sacrifice along the way, but it was still a pretty easy plan. There is no such easy path in the real world, which is why comic books and fantasy novels aren’t particularly good blueprints for foreign policy.

Ezra Klein believes a recent NYT Magazine profile of Rush Limbaugh is a “puff piece.” He lists, for example, Rush’s “presidential platform” as published:

1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.

3. Privatize Social Security.

4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.

5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country.

6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.

Ezra’s analysis:

If liberalish conservative intellectuals seek a Sam’s Club Conservatism, then #2 and #3 are the more traditional variant: Mercede’s conservatism. #4 is a bad public policy idea, but it is a public policy idea. But #1 #5, and #6 speak of a largely bankrupt movement: They’re pure resentment politics, mixed with a toxic distaste for empiricism. The stereotypical liberal loves the environment, so Limbaugh will drill up the shelf, a policy that won’t do much to increase the oil supply, but will presumably piss off Al Gore. And you know what will really piss off Al Gore? Doing nothing about global warming. Denying its very existence. Oh, and for good measure, screw Jimmy Carter.

I was an avid listener to Rush’s show once upon a time but hardly ever catch it these days owing to a combination of scheduling and the fact that I grew tired of the schtick some years back.  Still, this “platform” shows quite well why Rush is so popular with middle America.  And, no, it’s no ressentiment.

#1 and #6 have nothing to do with poking liberals in general or Al Gore in particular in the eye.  Rather, it’s a much more basic populist appeal:  “You’re paying four bucks a gallon for gas and these liberal do-gooders are more worried about the spotted owl than your ability to take care of your family!”

#2 and #3 aren’t about making the rich richer.  Frankly, while that would be great for Rush, he of the recent $400 million contract extension, you don’t get 20 million listeners by appealing to the top one percent of income earners.  Most Americans hate the tax code and, especially, the burden of keeping records and filing their taxes every year.  Pretty much everyone thinks it’s way too complicated and nobody knows whether they’re paying “their fair share” or not.  Indeed, most everyone suspects People like me are getting screwed while everyone who makes less or more than they do is getting over.  Social Security?  Most people support the idea behind the system — making sure granny can feed herself and keep the lights on — but they resent the huge amount withheld from their paycheck combined with a growing (if almost certainly incorrect) sense that they’ll never actually see any retirement dividends from the system.

#4 is about culture more than about education.  Middle America thinks the schools are brainwashing their kids to reject parental values rather than teaching the so-called “Three R’s.”  Beyond that, there’s a real sense that schools aren’t very good and that having to teach to the lowest common denominator is robbing their own kids (all of whom are above average) of a decent education.

#5 is a joke.  Rush doesn’t actually want to deport Jimmy Carter, he just enjoys poking fun at him. Republicans of a certain age find Jimmy Carter very funny.

Limbaugh’s appeal is that he’s simultaneously Everyman, expressing the values and frustrations of Regular People who believe their values and way of life are under assault from elites in Hollywood, the news media, higher education, and inside the dreaded Beltway as well as a very bright, humorous, entertaining fellow.  People enjoy spending parts of the three hours a day he’s on listening to him.  Whether they are giving him mega-dittos, shaking their head in disbelief, or screaming at the radio, they’re not bored.  Rush is more engaging than Sean Hannity, more comfortable than Michael Savage, funnier than Gordon Liddy, and less preachy than Laura Schlessinger.

His act wears thin if you’re an intellectual.  But he can afford to lose a few hundred people.

Photo: Nigel Parry for The New York Times

Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, “I’ve seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search.” He offers three likely explanations:

1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including Techmeme, Hacker News, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed and others.

2. People, especially those who read this site, are relying more on RSS readers, and many have subscribed to so many feeds that they are reading through stories in an effort to clear out their unread items, not clicking the embedded links.

3. People who actually read blogs on the site (outside of RSS) are clicking through to respond to the author with comments, rather than viewing links.

Indeed, I found his piece on Techmeme and had never heard of Gray before, despite his being a relatively big player in the tech-social media space.

Gray rank ordered his referrals from the last six months and, sure enough, search engines, social media sites, and aggregators delivered much more traffic than links from very popular blogs such as Scobleizer, TechCrunch, and Micro Persuasion.  None delivered more than 500 visitors!

My experience in the politics niche is quite different.  Yes, without question, Google and other search engines provide a significant share of OTB’s traffic.  For June, Google brought in 118,236 visits; Yahoo 10,574; MSN 4764; Google Images 2522; Ask 2147; and Windows Live 1914.  Aggregators memeorandum and RealClearPolitics brought in 1722 and 3635, respectively. Social media sites brought in negligible traffic:  Fark 1891, Digg 153, and StumbleUpon 129.

Still, blog linkage accounts for significant traffic and can bring in nice surges. In June, links from InstaPundit brought in 7502 visits, Balloon Juice 3812, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish 2371, and Matthew Yglesias 1495.  And that’s only counting top-level referrals, as I’m not ambitious enough to add up referrals from individual URLs within those sites or www/non-www variants.   Certainly, though, plenty of them brought in more than 500 visits.  And that’s in a single month, not a six-month period.  Indeed, links from any of those sites and many more can bring in more than 500 visitors in a single hour.   The key variable there is the nature of the link.  One that (Like this post, I’m afraid. Sorry, Louis.) provides significant excerpts of a post and provides extensive original analysis tend to send much less traffic to linked sites than posts that provide only a teaser.

It may well be that the ethics of linking and the reader habit of clicking through is more engrained on the political blogs than other sectors of the blogosphere.  In the celebrity gossip space, where I’ve also got a presence (albeit mainly an ownership/management one) there is relatively little linking to other blogs and, indeed, outright theft of content without even a nod in the direction of attribution is the norm.

I suspect, too, that the reading habits of tech and politics bloggers are simply different.  The handful of the former I read, for example, seem to be much more engaged with Twitter and various other social media outlets than most of us in the political space.

As I was sorting through my Sunday Washington Post so that I could throw everything but the Parade and Washington Post Magazine my wife reads into the recycle bin, my attention was grabbed by this photo montage on the front of the Style section:

For a second, I thought they had juxtaposed Barack Obama with Malcolm X (the newsprint version is grainier than the digital one).   But the Obama as Will Smith and John McCain and John Wayne comparison is more apt.

The illustration accompanies a Stephen Hunter feature entitled, “Leading Men -Barack Obama and John McCain Want the Biggest Role in Politics, Yet Each Candidate Has Very Different Star Qualities to Offer.”  The opening:

Wonderful moment in John Ford’s “The Searchers,” from way back in 1956: John Wayne, as the surly, violent Ethan Edwards, signals to his young compadre that it’s time to move on in their pursuit of Scar, the Comanche chief who’s murdered their family and kidnapped the youngest daughter, Debbie.

“Let’s go, blankethead,” he scowls to the young Martin Pawley.

I love the Duke’s pronunciation of the word “blankethead”; it radiates contempt for the young and the untested. Ethan is using the blast of scorn to tell the young man not only to get going to his horse but to get going in growing up, to acquire sand, grit, salt and all the other granular metaphors for old-guy toughness and savvy. Blankethead: It’s a three-syllable telegram on the theme of the fecklessness of youth, and nobody but Wayne could turn it into poetry.

But in the same instant, I remember Will Smith in the original “Men in Black.” The hotshot young cop has been recruited to an alien-hunting team secretly HQ’d in a New York bridge, and now he’s working for Tommy Lee Jones and Rip Torn. Torn and Jones are babbling about something and not paying attention to Smith. There’s a moment of frustration on the young face, and he interrupts with his own blast of scorn: “Hey, old guys !”

It’s a voice full of impatience, annoyance, even contempt, suggesting they haven’t the energy, the quickness or the attention span to take care of business. It’s on him, now, the new guy, the kid: He’s got to keep them from wandering off, losing track, drifting as the old are wont to do.

A bit strained, perhaps, but interesting.

An industry report claims that a non-trivial amount of the Bush tax relief checks were spent on adult web sites, with many sites reporting a 20-30 percent growth in membership during a normally slow period and claiming that “thirty two percent of respondents referenced the recent stimulus package as part of their decision to either become a new member, or renew an existing membership.”

I guess consumer spending is consumer spending but, somehow, I’m pretty sure this is not what they had in mind.

David Kurtz‘ mention that “until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I’ve worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor” perfectly encapsulates, for Andrew Sullivan, the New Media world. Indeed, the same’s true for me. I’ve never met any of the current regular writers for OTB, OTB Sports, or Gone Hollywood even though I’ve “known” most of them for half a decade.

Relatedly, I’m increasingly not only annoyed but genuinely surprised when something isn’t available immediately online. For example, I was going to blog an a Csaba Csere piece in Car and Driver that I’d read while waiting at the barber shop but it turns out C&D doesn’t put those columns up until the following month, presumably in an attempt to drive (no pun intended) people to subscribe to the print edition. For me, though, if it doesn’t exist online, it might as well not exist at all.

Reporters covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are having an increasingly difficult time of getting stories onto the network news, Brian Stelter reports for the NYT.

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed. Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”

[...]

Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year.

As the Big 3 networks struggle to get people to watch their newscasts, they’re cutting expenses to the bone while focusing coverage primarily on the things that they think will garner the most viewers. That spells trouble for international coverage generally and war coverage in particular, because they’re very expensive enterprises. When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were new and primarily kinetic (i.e., about killing people and blowing things up) they made for exciting television. The slow, tedious, nearly invisible work of counterinsurgency and stabilization operations? Not so much.

This is exacerbated, too, by an exciting presidential race. People are naturally more concerned about who their next president will be than about the state of affairs in villages in distant lands they will never visit.

Hilzoy, though, isn’t buying that explanation.

“Viewer interest” isn’t static and unalterable. The media decides to hype stories all the time, and in so doing makes people care about things they wouldn’t care about otherwise. The war in Iraq has a lot more intrinsic interest than the death of Anna Nicole Smith, the vagaries of Paris Hilton, or any of the other completely inane stories that the networks somehow manage to find time for. It shouldn’t be beyond the imaginations of reporters and producers to find a way to bring that interest out.

And we ought to care. We are responsible for the present state of Iraq, and we ought to care what happens there. Besides, we have men and women risking their lives in Iraq.

I have no doubt that the world ought to work that way. But it doesn’t. Look at the most trafficked sites selling BlogAds. They’re dominated by celebrity gossip sites, with only a handful of giant community blogs breaking into the top echelons. Perez Hilton gets 52.6 million page impressions a week. DailyKos, by far the most popular political blog community (which, by the way, isn’t primarily about war coverage) gets 6.9 million. The top site with a foreign affairs angle, The Agonist, gets 548,000. Yes, people should be more interested in Afghanistan than Hollywood. But, alas, they’re not.

Beyond that, given the amazing amount of information available on the Internet and, yes, even television, it’s simply not the case that people interested in getting in-depth coverage of the daily happenings and intelligent commentary on the longer term trends in these conflicts can’t get it easily.

George Carlin, a comedian known for his combination of raunchy language and intellectual humor, died of heart failure last evening. He was 71.

Carlin was an interesting guy, combining brilliant observational humor with political activism. Like too many comics in the HBO era, though, it often seemed that he was vulgar and outrageous simply because he could rather than because it served his art. It’s one thing to point to the absurdity of seven words that we all know being taboo in adult settings; it’s quite another to use them constantly simply for their shock value.

Dean Goodman, Reuters, “Edgy comic George Carlin dies in L.A., aged 71″

Known for his edgy, provocative material developed over 50 years, the bald, bearded Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1978 case, Federal Communications Commission vs. Pacifica Foundation, the top U.S. court ruled that the words cited in Carlin’s routine were indecent, and that the government’s broadcast regulator could ban them from being aired at times when children might be listening.

The Grammy-winning Carlin remained an active presence on the comedy circuit. Carlin was scheduled to receive the John F. Kennedy Center’s prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in November and his publicist said Carlin performed in Las Vegas this month.

His comedic sensibility revolved around a central theme: humanity is a cursed, doomed species. “I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don’t believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas,” he told Reuters in a 2001 interview. Carlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a “heavenly CNN.” “The world is a big theater-in-the round as far as I’m concerned, and I’d love to watch it spin itself into oblivion,” he said. “Tune in and watch the human adventure.”

Keith St. Clair, AP, “Carlin, counterculture comedians’ dean, dies at 71″

Carlin’s jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the “Seven Words” — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day. When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance. When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening. “So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the “Saturday Night Live” debut in 1975 — noting on his Web site that he was “loaded on cocaine all week long” — and appearing some 130 times on “The Tonight Show.” He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in 1989 — a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

“Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?” he once mused. “Are they afraid someone will clean them?”

His longtime comedic partner Jack Burns says that Carlin was “fairly conservative,” both politically and stylistically, until he saw Lenny Bruce perform in the early 1960s.

“It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction.” That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

“The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it’s all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition,” Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. “There’s an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. … It’s reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.”

Martin Weil, WaPo, “Comedian George Carlin Dies in Los Angeles at 71″

The New York-born performer, who also was an Air Force veteran, once summed up his approach:”I think it is the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”

Carlin’s entertainment career began in 1956 at a radio station in Shreveport, La. while he was in the service.

Mel Watkins, NYT, “George Carlin, Splenetic Comedian, Dies at 71″

Mr. Carlin began his standup comedy act in the late 1950s and made his first television solo guest appearance on “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1965. At that time, he was primarily known for his clever wordplay and reminiscences of his Irish working-class upbringing in New York.

But from the outset there were indications of an anti-establishment edge to his comedy. Initially, it surfaced in the witty patter of a host of offbeat characters like the wacky sportscaster Biff Barf and the hippy-dippy weatherman Al Sleet. “The weather was dominated by a large Canadian low, which is not to be confused with a Mexican high. Tonight’s forecast . . . dark, continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning.”

[...]

In 1970, Mr. Carlin discarded his suit, tie, and clean-cut image as well as the relatively conventional material that had catapulted him to the top. Mr. Carlin reinvented himself, emerging with a beard, long hair, jeans and a routine that, according to one critic, was steeped in “drugs and bawdy language.” There was an immediate backlash. The Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas terminated his three-year contract, and, months later, he was advised to leave town when an angry mob threatened him at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club. Afterward, he temporarily abandoned the nightclub circuit and began appearing at coffee houses, folk clubs and colleges where he found a younger, hipper audience that was more attuned to both his new image and his material.

[...]

By the mid-’70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr. Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade. In addition to his irreverent jests about religion and politics, he openly talked about the use of drugs, including acid and peyote, and said that he kicked cocaine not for moral or legal reasons but after he found “far more pain in the deal than pleasure.” But the edgier, more biting comedy he developed during this period, along with his candid admission of drug use, cemented his reputation as the “comic voice of the counterculture.”

Reactions from the blogosphere:

• Sean Hackbarth: “Carlin was entertaining enough, although I wasn’t a real fan. If I caught one of his acts while surfing HBO I’d watch a few minutes and laugh. He certainly found unique ways of looking at the world. He’ll be missed.”

• BNP: “What a loss for all of us. Carlin was more than a comedian: he was a brilliant critic in all sorts of realms.”

• Allie: “I’m going to miss George tremendously — rest in peace funny man.”

• Liza Sabater: “An amazingly simple legacy of free speech, civil disobedience, philosophy of language and culture criticism all wrapped up in the guise of stand up comedy.”

• Jill C.: “We’re living in a world of hypocrites, idiots, thieves, and morons — and now we don’t even have George Carlin to poke fun at them any more.”

• Kevin Aylward: “Carlin … mined comedy from the absurdity of words and fighting censorship.”

• Ann Althouse: “There are decades-old routines that spring to mind immediately as the most brilliant comic riffs I’ve ever heard…”

Memeorandum will doubtless have many more reax once people wake up to the news.